The daily beast review ‘Great Photo Lovely Life – Uncovering a Grandpa’s Decades Long History of Sexual Abuse’
Awash in old pictures and film clips of Bill and his relatives, Great Photo, Lovely Life gazes at the past as a means of exposing the truth behind the lie. – Anderson and Mustard expose the intricacies of this harrowing dynamic with empathy and sensitivity. Nonetheless, it’s a reckoning that ultimately cuts like a knife, leaving no one—dead or alive—unscathed.
COLLIDER – ‘Great Photo, Lovely Life Review: An HBO Documentary That Transcends True Crime’
A great documentary can be many things. It can illuminate an aspect of a well-worn subject in a new way or pack an unexpected punch even within the confines of a familiar story. At the same time, many others can feel like an incomplete profile in how they attempt to capitalize on the infamy of a subject without adding much of anything new. – This makes the HBO documentary Great Photo, Lovely Life a necessary correction to these types of films as, while it doesn’t shy away from the darkness at its core, it is also aware of the agonies it is excavating.
Rolling stone REVIEW – ‘Great Photo, Lovely Life’: A Filmmaker Bravely Confronts her Grandpa’
The truth she exposes in Great Photo, along with co-director Rachel Beth Anderson, removes a cloak of silence, complicity, and fear, one painful but cathartic frame at a time. – Great Photo is ultimately about the incalculable value of truth, and the pains that might be required to reach it. Despite what Keats said, it can be quite ugly. And yet it remains as essential as the air we breathe.
chicago tribune ‘Review: A filmmaker confronts her grandfather in the HBO documentary’
The film is the kind of highly personal and bracing project that you rarely encounter on streaming platforms these days, where the term “documentary” has come to mean something much cheaper and reductive. – The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t ask you to judge Debi or her mother, so much as to reckon with their complicity, which is fraught and messy and infuriating and tragic all at once.
‘Great Photo, Lovely Life’ Is Brutal and Important Storytelling
This is a documentary project that’s setting out to ask questions rather than pretending to be able to answer them or draw easy morals or emotional catharsis. It’s the difficult work of true crime, dwelling with the harm done and reckoning with it in a way that is patient and non-superficial. And, on an entirely separate point, Great Photo, Lovely Life is a beautifully shot and constructed documentary. Between Amanda’s photojournalistic eye and Anderson’s cinematography, there’s a visual sensibility about the documentary’s presentation that is just stunning.
WRITE DRUNK; EDIT DRUNK – ‘great photo lovely life review’
The subject matter is captured in an oddly beautiful way. The photographs themselves are mostly incredible to look at, the video footage fun and grainy (and with an undertone that makes it feel like at any moment this will turn into Scott Derrickson’s Sinister), and the way Mustard and co-director Rachel Beth Anderson (First to Fall, Unschooled) bring these images to you is breathtaking.
Variety Film Review: ‘E-Team’
Another scene of startling immediacy — and risk to the filmmakers — reveals how the pair managed to sneak into Syria, with Anderson’s camera trailing Neistat and Solvang as they travel by car through Turkey in the dead of night, then cross the border on foot over barbed wire and begin to run. “We’re in Syria!” Ole announces in an early example of the E-Team’s disarming sense of humor. “We’re safe!”
IDA DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE – ‘CONTINUING TO SHOOT AFTER THE SHOOTING STARTS: DANGEROUS DOC-MAKING’
“There’s something about putting that camera up,” Anderson says. She won the jury prize for excellence in cinematography at Sundance 2014 for her work on E-Team – “All of a sudden you’re using your technical brain,” Anderson explains. “You’re able to push back against the fear because you’re there to a do a job—a good job, but most importantly you are aware that the risk is only worth it if you are able to bring back the story.”
EYE FOR FILM REVIEW: ‘FIRST TO FALL’
The atmosphere generated is surreal, a point underlined by shots of a hospital where all the women and children want to be photographed holding a semi-automatic. Elsewhere, there is poignancy, both in the changes that their experiences force on Hamid and Tarek and in other subtler scenes, such as a child moving in and out of a crowd of praying men. It’s a nod towards an uncertain future and a disillusionment Hamid will go on to spell out.
Télérama – The Magazine (France): ‘First to fall’ wins two jury awards
Special mention Jury Award and the Youth Jury Award winner. This punchy documentary on the war in Libya could also have been the perfect pick for Grand Prix. – From the first five minutes, the directors make this documentary a real cinematic film with characters for whom we connnect too, but which does not prevent them from raising a lot of questions on the role taken by social networks in time of war.
INDIEWIRE – ‘E-TEAM’ FILMMAKERS FOLLOW FOUR HUMAN RIGHTS WATCHERS INTO DANGER
Katie Chevigny (E-Team Director): Our producer Marilyn was tasked with finding somebody to go to Syria – she called DP after DP after DP, and pretty much all of them said, “I have to check with my wife or my girlfriend,” and they all came back with “she said no.” Finally, Marilyn called Rachel, this 24-year-old woman who didn’t have a wife or girlfriend to say no. She had a mom, who Marilyn would call every day to tell her she was safe. Marilyn had a lot of gray hairs over that one, but she did an amazing job.
OPEN DEMOCRACY REVIEW ‘FIRST TO FALL’
Perhaps the most shocking element of ‘First to Fall’ is that it was singlehandedly shot by Anderson, who navigated the male-only battlefields and braved unimaginable risks as an unarmed cameraman caught in open fire. Her relationship with the main characters and the trust she gained are clear in the insider access her camera gains to their private moments. This is most definitely a valiant and commendable debut film by a journalist who made the film after meeting Hamid and Tarek while on assignment in Benghazi in 2011.